Brown's record is more fragile than I realized, regardless of Cambridge's status. Columbia is dangerous if it can keep playing well at home. I have no idea what to make of Princeton either, but remember that "momentum" has meant nothing over the last couple seasons.

Also important to look at can be Game Scripts. Essentially, a Game Script is the average lead that a team holds throughout the game (think of it as the "area under the curve"). Game Scripts correlate very well with which team wins the overall game (it's harder to win games you don't lead for extended periods of time, and incrementally harder to win games where you dig yourself a massive hole).

Through 32 Ivy games, Ivy teams that win the game script battle are 24-8. The two biggest game script upsets were Harvard-Columbia (Columbia won despite a -2.8 game script) and Harvard-Cornell (Harvard won despite a -2.2 game script). No other teams have won with a game script of -2.0 or less.

Tightest game thus far has been Columbia-Brown: Brown had a +0.2 game script.

It’s basically if we took the margin at all 2400 seconds and averaged them together - so it’s a combination of how long you hold a lead and the magnitude of the lead.

I can pull any of the years, and I probably should just to see how this holds. Knowing the win pcts by game script, I have to imagine that it holds across years (might be minor deviations in rank if the averages are close). But it’s worth checking for sure.

I don't know if it's more predictive of the future - something to test, for sure - but it seems better descriptive of the past. What I mean by that is that the efficiency margins, as you know, are merely the final score divided by pace. But you can get to that final score in myriad different ways (some ways are good representations of teams playing hard and at their best and some, umm, not so much), and this does a better job describing how we got there in one number.

Here are the past Game Scripts by year back to 2015 (note that by 2015, there are games here and there that are missing, but nothing major):

All the rest were under four. So, as you can see, the ability to win a game script that is more than four points against you is very hard (Ivy teams are 7-111 in those games in league play over the past four seasons).

No doubt - the point is not supposed to be at all surprising. Very intuitive. It’s more about the description of the game. If all I see is the final score, seeing the game script can be very useful context for understanding how the game went. I won’t know if a 10-point game was a tight one where a handful of free throws in the final minute pushed it from competitive to comfortable or if the game was healthy double-digits throughout but the losing team finished on a run in garbage time to close it to 10.

My hypothesis too (untested) is that the final stretch of the game can get unrepresentative of the normal course of the game. For instance, if a team down double-digits throughout hits a bunch of threes and gets the leading team to miss 1-and-1s and parts of double bonuses and miraculously comes all the way back, that may not be as useful a signal of that team’s true quality as the bulk of the game played more normally. So, it might be that adding game script info to the efficiency margin info (and the expected points per shot info) could enhance the predictive nature of team performance moving forward.